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[wierd]

Not in nursing.

There is a genuine shortage of workers.  It takes a very special aptitude to work with people on that level, because it wears you out. (No, really. "Compassion Fatigue" is a thing.)

The problem in nursing is that there are compounding factors working to actively keep wages depressed.  It's caused by high equipment and drug prices, high prices for doctor time (because there is a doctor shortage, and doctors are valued more than nurses, despite doctors requiring nurses to meet their patient's needs), and a general view that "just a nurse" implies some unskilled woman with lots of compassion, but little training. (which is of course, bullshit.)

You would think that with a genuine shortage going on, compensation would be up; But it's not.

[Reelya]

Your first link says a projected shortage of nurses:

According to the “United States Registered Nurse Workforce Report Card and Shortage Forecast” published in the January 2012 issue of the American Journal of Medical Quality, a shortage of registered nurses is projected to spread across the country between 2009 and 2030. In this state-by-state analysis, the authors forecast the RN shortage to be most intense in the South and the West.

Also, the average wage for a nurse in the USA is said to be $73,550, which is much higher than the median wage in the USA of $47,000.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=average+wage+nurses+usa

So, can you break down your claim that nurses are heavily underpaid and that their pay rates don't reflect any shortage? I think this might be kind of a meme that nursing is poorly-paid drudge work, because it's women, right? so it must by definition be underpaid and under-appreciated. you can find a number of sources talking about how nursing as a career is at odds with the feminist movement. Probably because how lucrative nursing actually is (along with being 'traditional') is at odds with the feminist mantra that everything is terrible and getting worse for women. Nursing is in fact a goddamn great career for women in terms of income, job security and promotion prospects.

[wierd]

Current supply of nurses is insufficient, in addition to the projected needs cited.

The "Low" statement was in comparison to more male-dominated careers, with similar levels of educational requirements.

Remember, the wage values you are referring to, are so high because of mandatory overtime. It is not reflective of base pay rates.

[Reelya]

first up, there are graphs showing the growth of nursing wages over time. nursing has in fact kept pace with physicians, and grown even while dentistry, a more male-dominated discipline has stagnated. This was the top google image search result for "usa nursing wages rising"



Second, in the private sector, you don't get paid for how educated you are, but for how much revenue you generate for your organization. I think it's also likely that you'll find that those high-paying male careers have more risk/reward and less job security than your nursing ones do. Job stability is a perk that means more people are willing to pick that career, so they trade-off wages for that, the same as male developers who choose lower-pay in game dev trade off fun and passion for higher wages they'd get doing finance apps or something.

There's also survivor bias. By only comparing say successful employed bankers vs nurses, you ignore the fact that banking is a higher-stakes career where there are more potential failures who dropped out and ended up in a different industry. for example, how many unemployed game developers are there out there, vs how many unemployed nursing graduates?

[wierd]

Nurse turnover is alarmingly high, hovering at around 18% per year.  While less than banking, it's hardly what I would consider "easy" or "comfortable."  The turnover statistic is not because people get fired, it is because "It wears you out, and there is no relief." There is no shortage or work-- there's more work than there are hours humans can provide.


Again, total salary figures have overtime as part of their component, since there really arent any nurses working that are not constantly working overtime. Base pay rate is really what you need to look at.

Risk takes many forms, and mental health deterioration is a very real risk. One that is not well compensated for.

Some estimates place the nursing profession to have an increased depression statistic 2 times higher than national average. They are also more likely to smoke, and more likely to commit suicide.

(~14% of US population smokes)
(~25% of nurses smoke.)
(There is strong data linking rate of smoking with rate of depression and suicide in nurses.)

[Reelya]

Again, that comes down to the supply rate of new graduates, not some mystical 'value' that 'society' puts on different jobs.

Things like burnout/turn-over will in fact push wages up because that's increasing things on the demand side (need more new workers), whereas things like increasing nursing places at universities will push wages down, because that's increasing things on the supply side (more applicants per role).

And in fact, looking at graphs, the wages for nurses are in fact growing strongly, which reflects the demand-side pressures of needing more nurses, and existing nurses being over-worked. BTW, the medical profession doesn't in fact have that high of a turnover compared to industries as a whole:



The industry average is 15% turnover per annum, making nursing at 18% per annum seem pretty might right on the average.

[wierd]

"and still have staff"

That is the operative part here, but you don't realize it.

Despite the career being abysmally difficult because of impossible workplace demands, the vocation is comprised of people with a high emotive capacity that WANT to provide care, despite its deleterious effects.  This causes the workers to TOLERATE more bullshit, like lower pay, and higher mandatory overtime, compared to other vocations. I have supplied ample citations for how base pay has remained flat since the 2010s.  What has increased, is the mandatory overtime.

If you include other, rank and file caregivers, there's an epidemic of exploitation by care facilities.

[Reelya]

Let me point out that your 'nursing wages are depressed' link merely states that wages for a specific type of nurse didn't increase between 2016 and 2017, and for a different type of nurse, they didn't increase between 2015 and 2016. I guess if the temperature this year is the same as last year, then global warming isn't happening either.

This is really poor evidence, sorry. First, you said 'actively depressed', but the link says it stayed the same, and only covers a single year. You've made a much bigger claim there than you have data to back it up, and you haven't actually shown that nursing wage growth between 2016-2017 did any worse than any other industry, either.

[wierd]

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/903258

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/healthcare-jobs-grow-at-rapid-clip-but-wages-lag-amid-consolidation-boom/552765/


But let's look at rate of growth in wages compared to national averages.

https://www.epi.org/nominal-wage-tracker/

They state that nominal yearly growth is ~3.2% for real hourly workers.

From my second link:

"For nurses and pharmacists working in hospitals in heavily concentrated markets, annual wage growth has been lagging behind national rates by as much as 1.7 times"

So yeah-- depressed.

[Reelya]

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/903258

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/healthcare-jobs-grow-at-rapid-clip-but-wages-lag-amid-consolidation-boom/552765/

Your first link says " In 2017, for the first time, average annual nurse wages and hourly rates of pay failed to increase significantly." if it "increased significantly" every other year before 2017 then there isn't good evidence that something has systematically "depressed" wages the whole time, it just failed to grow that particular year, and that specific year is even noted in your source as being an anomaly, not the norm.

It's literally a single data-point that's not indicative of previous trends. If something only occurred that one time, for the "first time" according to your source you don't actually have evidence of that. And the second source gives a reason for that - there have been recent mergers of providers. Usually when that happens they will consolidate higher-level / admin positions to increase efficiency. That's the point of merging after all, to streamline things.

Also, if you go google "wage growth USA" you'd notice there was a general slump in 2016:


So at the point that wages stopped rising for nurses, it just happened to be at the same moment of the lowest level of national wage growth in the past 5 years, across all industries. note, that they said "for the first time" for that one, too, so even in the depths of the Global Financial Crisis, when wages were dropping, nursing wages still grew. This kinda contradicts the idea that there are nursing-specific things which "depress" their wages in ways other industries don't have to worry about.

Also:
https://nightingale.edu/blog/nurse-salary-by-state/

In March 2019, The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that between May 2017 and May 2018, registered nurses brought in a median salary of $71,730 per year – a 3.7% increase compared to the previous year.

So, yeah the "stagnation" from 2016-2017 was literally a one-year blip not repeated either before or since, which can be more or less completely explained since literally every other industry was going through the same general thing right then.

[wierd]

(one data point)

Let's fix that!

There's a convenient place we can look:
https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm

So, let's pull all the datasets from 1997 to the present, and look year by year. This will take me a bit to do, so I will edit in a bit. (They used XLS format, because they are tools. I need to install libreoffice.)

Spoiler: Mean average yearly wages for nurses, by year (click to show/hide)

1997
41,400

1998
43,070

1999
44,470

2000
46,410

2001
48,240

2002
49,840

2003
52,810

2004
55,680

2005
56,880

2006
59,730

2007
62,480

2008
65,130

2009
66,530

2010
67,720

2011
69,110

2012
67,930

2013
68,910

2014
69,790

2015
71,000

2016
72,180

2017
73,550

2018
75,510

Spoiler: Mean average yearly income (all vocations) by year (click to show/hide)

1997
30,935

1998
31,943

1999
36,297

2000
37,902

2001
34,020

2002
35,560

2003
36,210

2004
37,020

2005
37,870

2006
39,190

2007
40,690

2008
42,270

2009
43,460

2010
44,410

2011
45,230

2012
45,790

2013
46,440

2014
47,230

2015
48,320

2016
49,630

2017
50,620

2018
51,960

Now, let's compare deltas, year by year, between these sets, as both raw change values and percentage changes.

Spoiler: Delta comparisons (not complete!) (click to show/hide)

Nursing (raw | percent change)                 All Occupations (raw| Percent change)

1997-1998
(+1,670 | +4.03%)  ( +1,008 | +3.26%)

1998-1999
(+1,400 | +3.25%)  (+4,354 | +13.63% )

1999-2000
(+1,940 | +4.36%)  ( +1,605 | +4.42% )

2000-2001
(+1,830 | +3.94%)  ( -3,882 | -10.24%)

2001-2002
(+1,600 | +3.32%)  (+1,540 | +4.53%)

2002-2003
(+2,970 | +5.96%)  (+650 | +1.83%)

2003-2004
(+2,870 | +5.43%)  (+810 | +2.24%)

2004-2005
(+1,200 | +2.16%)  (+850 | +2.3%)

2005-2006
(+2,850 | +5.01%)  (+1,320 | +3.49%)

2006-2007
(+2,750 | +4.60%)  (+1,500 | +3.83%)

2007-2008
(+2,650 | +4.24%)  (+1,580 | +3.88%)

2008-2009


2009-2010


2010-2011


2011-2012


2012-2013


2013-2014


2014-2015


2015-2016


2016-2017


2017-2018

[Reelya]

https://work.chron.com/salaries-changed-nurses-23316.html

By 1988, RN wages had increased to $28,383 annually, according to “Nursing Economics,” and they continued to rise until by 1992, when the average RN wage was $37,738.
...
Nurses earned a median annual wage of $64,690 in May 2010, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Over 22 years that's an average growth off 3.8% per year, which is exactly in line with the 3.7% growth between 2017 and 2018. We can say then that 3.8% per year is the average rate at which nursing wages increase in the long-run, which exceeds average inflation over the same span by 1% per year:
http://www.in2013dollars.com/1988-dollars-in-2010

Accounting for inflation, that's a ~ 25% real wage increase since 1988 for nurses. The median income American has only gained 6% in real terms between 1979 and 2014
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
which means 6% in ~35 years, or about 0.16% real inflation-adjusted wage growth per year. That means that inflation-adjusted wages for nurses have increased about 6 times faster than the median American since 1988.

[wierd]

We might be in agreement, I am seeing consistent divergence between "all occupations" and "Nursing" average median yearly incomes, with nursing having a greater net trend.  I am not finished doing year to year percentage and raw delta computations though, and I will want to compute a male dominated sample vocation for comparison as well, but this is taking for freaking ever.

I will update previous post with what I have so far, and then sleep. I work tonight so I cannot stay up doing this right now, but I will complete this task tomorrow night.

[Egan_BW]

Reminds me of the construction labor shortage that we're also currently suffering from.


...actually, that's kind of concerning. That's at least two major fields where we're suffering from labor shortages. I'm starting to think that the economy is outpacing the capacity for the country to do work- that is, we're reaching an economic level that requires more people working than there actually are.

This is starting to get really weird.

Sounds like an economy ripe for automation.

[wierd]

Automation?  In nursing? (stifles mad laughter)

While the Japanese are indeed totally and madly in love with the idea, think on this a minute:

You know how when you call technical support, and get a recording, and wait forever to reach one of the handfuls of real people that can actually service your need, you get a bit angry and put off by the whole process?

Well-- Now throw in "Life and death" situations, and "I am in unbearable pain!" into the mix.  With a robot, who is incapable of empathy.
(Or you know, you could look more realistically at the state of machine vision, and honestly ask yourself if you REALLY want a bipedal robot with such vision systems attempting to help you when you are in a full body cast from your automobile accident. We are talking intimate care here; Your arms and legs are in casts, and you just shat yourself; Also, your catheter needs cath-care. Do you really want that system handling your junk for you? Remember, foley catheters are held in using a water balloon inside your bladder, and to clean the catheter, you have to pull back the meatus, and clean the length of the tubing several times. Do you really want a robot pulling on that, when it cannot respond adequately if you are injured by this process?)


Yeah, that will go places, I'm sure!  We are a very long way away from general AI strong enough to do that kind of thing.  VERY long.